Open XML is an open ECMA 376 standard and is also approved as the ISO/IEC 29500 standard that defines a set of XML schemas for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations, and word processing documents. Microsoft Office Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 all use Open XML as the default file format.

The Open XML file formats are useful for developers because they use an open standard and are based on well-known technologies: ZIP and XML.

The Open XMLSDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office is built on top of the System.IO.Packaging API and provides strongly typed part classes to manipulate Open XML documents. The SDK also uses the .NET Framework Language-Integrated Query (LINQ) technology to provide strongly typed object access to the XML content inside the parts of Open XML documents.

The Open XMLSDK 2.0 simplifies the task of manipulating Open XML packages and the underlying Open XML schema elements within a package. The Open XMLApplication Programming Interface (API) encapsulates many common tasks that developers perform on Open XML packages, so you can perform complex operations with just a few lines of code.

The tools package contains the Open XMLSDK v2.0 Productivity Tool for Office and the documentation for the Open XMLSDK v2. The Open XMLSDK 2.0 Productivity Tool for Microsoft Office provides a number of features designed to improve your productivity and accelerate your learning while working with the SDK and Open XML files. Features include the ability to generate Open XMLSDK 2.0 source code based on document content, compare source and target Open XML documents to reveal differences and to generate source code to create the target from the source, validate documents, and display documentation for the Open XMLSDK v2.0, the ECMA376v1 standard, and the Microsoft Office implementation notes.